This packaging project started with hand made concept mockups. A range of sizes covering the intended retail price breaks for the end-user.

Vital and key to success on the project was regular communication between client and our design team.

Paramount importance placed on combining the client’s raw concept into a working, practical solution for the end-user. Angled profile of the carton employed to ensure easy stacking in the busy restaurant environment. Workable lid and double wall construction ensuring product remained hot with a grease free exterior. These were focus points of the design very early on.

Photo-shoot mockups were printed and produced for marketing and promotion. Our state of the art digital UV printing onto kraft board, selected for grease proofing and BRC compliant, ensuring the closest match to actual production versions.

We even produced a giant, oversized version on corrugated board with internal structural supports!

Providing a new take on the humble fried potato, Come Fry With Me makes the spud the main attraction and makes it available as skinny, skin-on or duck fat gastro fries. What started out as a festival fry truck favourite, founded by Tiffany Plant at the age of 24, the Come Fry With Me cry is: “fries are delicious!” And here you can have them with Marmite, rosemary or steak either Flavoured, Topped or in a Butty. Forget vinegar and salt, here the chips are tossed in truffle and Parmesan, coated in Guinness batter, or served rustic style with their skins on and fried with rosemary and garlic. Mix it up with a medley of fries with parsnip, carrot and courgette and try cinnamon sweet potato to satisfy a sweet tooth. The aesthetic of the Covent Garden cafe embraces the heyday of 1960s air travel with wooden surfaces and fluid curved lines. Brightly coloured lines guide guests to signs overhead and fries arrive on the ‘fry carousel’ conveyor belt. – londontown.com

Spring Summer Promo – Offer extended until the end of September

Brand owners, designers & retailers. It’s that time of year when budgets are released for new packaging but we know how restrictive the purse strings have got these days so we want to give you a free prototype to help you out.

Give us your packaging project to mockup, and we’ll give you one free prototype design

Our team are renowned for getting things done very quickly and without fuss. Your packaging concept made real and as true to the production version as you’re likely to get. Our core business isn’t mockups. We’re actually a reprographic and prepress business for the packaging and print industry starting more than 30 years ago. You could say we have insider knowledge!

CALL CRAIG NOW TO DISCUSS YOUR PROJECT ON 0044 7808 847 488

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History of prepress and our company

During the 1980s and 1990s, computer-aided prepress techniques began to supplant the traditional dark room and light table processes, and by the early 2000s the word prepress became, in some ways, synonymous with digital pre-press.

Immediately before the mainstream introduction of computers to the process, much of the industry was using large format cameras to make emulsion-based (film) copies of text and images. This film was then assembled (stripping) and used to expose another layer of emulsion on a plate, thus copying images from one emulsion to another. This method is still used; however, as digital pre-press technology has become less cost intensive, more efficient and reliable, and as the knowledge and skill required to use the new hardware and especially software have become more widespread within the labor force, digital automation has been introduced to almost every part of the process.

We grew up with the craft like prepress era but we’ve long kept those hands-on skills relevant by creating stunning, physical packaging mockups

Our staff here are not just about working in a digital prepress environment. Skills have been kept alive and relevant by making your packaging concepts real.

We advise and help ensure your project will be as close as possible to the real thing. We have the hands-on skill to fashion your packaging in the best possible way.

70% student discount

We’re trialling an offer for students studying at colleges and universities. Students that require packaging mockups for their course work can contact us direct and make use of our expert industry packaging knowledge.

More info on this coming soon.

If you have an immediate requirement, please contact Craig on 01255 245422 or 240444

On a few occasions we’ve had designers approach us with two conflicting requirements. They have a budget that will not move and a need for reflective, metallic effects on their packaging, particularly with carton packaging. This happened only last week here at MPH.

We quoted for a straight forward, process digital print with a backing white spot colour produced on our digital press, the cost effective option.

Halfway house was digital print with mixed post-processes such as traditionally printed varnishes and foiling, nearly as close as the real production packaging.

The money no object option was a traditionally printed mockup using our flatbed, wet-proofing printing press using HD digital photopolymer* letterpress printing plates and hot foil stamping creating the ultimate, wet-proof prototype that can be presented to clients and given to a printer as a target to reach.

*The same kit that produces the flexographic printing plates in a real production situation, the machine images both types.

Back on point. The designer was so concerned about it; they had felt the need to send two Adobe illustrator artwork files to me, one the standard artwork that would be used for final repro and another where the reflective effect was mimicked with half-tone gradients. Their concern was well founded as indeed, digital print onto standard white carton board was not very effective and the gradient version not much better.

The solution

A technique we employed enabled the print to be standard, no trick gradients and produced in a cost effective digital process print. The difference was that the carton board had been coated and thus made reflective. Some tweaks to the client’s artwork by our skilled artwork operator and a very effective printed result was reached, within budget and looking very close to a high end production piece with metallic inks and foils.

is their tag line for this rather unusual product for those of us that find egg yolk separation particularly tricky in the kitchen. A simple concept whereby the volunteer attempts to literally suck the yolk up and away from the white. I’m dubious as to this would actually work! Regardless there is some neat bespoke box and tabletop presentation packaging promoting one of the strangest kitchen products I’ve seen in recent years.

Our twitter mascot discovered this on his journey around the web and I thought it was a fantastic example of what can be done with shrink sleeves (plus the photography is 100% better than what I can do here at MPH!). In the past we’ve experimented with our shrink sleeve mockups by printing undersurface as normal but then screen printing a tactile varnish on top.

As you can see with this picture, the moisture drops look effective as a print but imagine what effect can be achieved by having a raised tactile on top? Trust me, the results are impressive. Feel free to contact us if you need further specialist information on how to do it if you feel your design concept would benefit from it. We work with flexo printers that can produce this along with the specialist techniques required from the mass production side, not just how to make a great sales sample.